Year: 2013

Recently the Dish noted Joan Acocella’s review of recent biographies of St. Francis of Assisi. Michael Signorelli goes over similar ground, mixing personal reflections with a review of the saint’s life, and points to this arresting story of his interactions with Muslims:

To make his message plain, Francis sought to eliminate the distance between his words and his actions, proposing himself as a model to his order, applying “a hierarchy of example through his own personal witness.” Most famously, in the summer of 1219, the Poor Man of Assisi arrived in Damietta, a crucial port on the Nile Delta, held by the sultan al-Malik al-Kamil. Troops of the Fifth Crusade had been besieging the city for almost a year to no decisive result. After an offensive by the Crusaders ended in bloody defeat, a truce was called. Francis made his move, leaving the Christian camp, approaching enemy lines, calling out the sultan’s name. The sultan granted him an audience and the Poor Man of Assisi remained in the enemy camp for several days. Contemporary sources attest to the historicity of the event. But even they must speculate as to what occurred between the sultan and the monk. Did Francis denounce Islam? Did he try to convert the sultan? Was his holiness tested? Was he tortured? What’s certain is that he wasn’t killed—an astounding feat considering the martial context. One clue to his survival can be found in the Franciscan rule of 1221:

The brothers who go thus [among the Muslims] can envisage their spiritual role … by not making accusations or disputes, but being subject to every human creature for the sake of God and simply confessing they are Christians.

Unlike Mother Church, who viewed Islam as its greatest enemy, Brother Francis approached the other faith in the love of God. But the prescription of respect proved too innovative for the Church and disappeared only two years later in the rule of 1223.

It returned in 1963. In Francis, you find the actual Christian: deeply faithful but also deeply humble and above all, peace-seeking. There was no one more orthodox in theology than Francis. But no one more heterodox in how he lived as a Christian. My take on the saint can be read here.

(Painting by Cigoli)

Paul Campos suspects that the student debt bubble will prove worse than the housing bubble:

In effect, the system allows any 22-year-old American University chooses to admit to borrow a sum equal to the average home mortgage, but without a single one of the actuarial controls that are supposed to minimize the risk that homeowners will borrow too much money.

(Chart from (pdf) “Why Are Recent College Graduates Underemployed?”)

Ryan McGee wants more short-term TV shows:

There always will be a place for a show that follows a procedural model and can sustain stories for decades on end without worry of running out of criminals to catch, patients to heal, or a family crisis to handle before dinnertime. What follows here isn’t a rallying cry to abandon those types of shows. Nor does this stem from a desire to stop any attempt to unleash a complex, multifaceted story that necessitates years in the telling of it.

However, I would say that those are almost the only two models currently in play, and that’s hurting the medium as a whole.

Alyssa Rosenberg asks Alex Gibney, director of Mea Maxima Culpa, whether he sees “commonalities between the Catholic Church and some of the other institutions [Gibney has] made movies about.” Part of Gibney’s response:

[W]hat’s not unique about the church is they’re so convinced of their own good deeds that they’re blind to the possibility that they could do any wrong. Enron was so convinced that it was on this mission to save capitalism by coming up with this technologically sophisticated, unregulated capitalism that would save the world. If you have to cook the books in order to make Enron look a little bit better to protect the sanctity of that idea, that’s what you have to do. The Boy Scouts are so good you can’t let a few bad apples damage that. Every institution likes to believe it’s not the values of the insitution, but a few bad apples.

Earlier thoughts on the film here and here.

Sam Wang recently tackled gerrymandering:

The great gerrymander of 2012 came 200 years after the first use of this curious word, which comes from the salamander-shaped districts signed into law by Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. Gov. Gerry’s party engineered its electoral coup using paper maps and ink. But the advent of inexpensive computing and free software has placed the tools for fighting politicians who draw absurd districts into the hands of citizens like you and me.

And we have to use them. The one state which did not have congressional results skewed way out of line with the popular vote was California, which took these decisions out of politicians’ hands and into the California Citizens Redistricting Commission. I say “politicians” in general, because both parties are guilty at times – but it’s striking that by far the most abuse recently has come from Republicans:

In the seven states where Republicans redrew the districts, 16.7 million votes were cast for Republicans and 16.4 million votes were cast for Democrats. This elected 73 Republicans and 34 Democrats… In North Carolina, where the two-party House vote was 51 percent Democratic, 49 percent Republican, the average simulated delegation was seven Democrats and six Republicans. The actual outcome? Four Democrats, nine Republicans — a split that occurred in less than 1 percent of simulations. If districts were drawn fairly, this lopsided discrepancy would hardly ever occur.

Which is not surprising. The Republicans are losing demographically and are responding not by shifting their core positions – because they are effectively a religious organization founded on unalterable doctrines, and not a sane political party – but by rigging the system. Among the most rigged states? Virginia, Ohio and Florida. If this Congress had not been rigged, we would have a House with a GOP majority of only five or so. We’d have something called representative democracy.

(Above image: “Original cartoon of ‘The Gerry-Mander’, this is the political cartoon that led to the coining of the term Gerrymander. The district depicted in the cartoon was created by Massachusetts legislature to favor the incumbent Democratic-Republican party candidates of Governor Elbridge Gerry over the Federalists in 1812.” Cartoon From Wikimedia Commons.)

Timothy Noah questions one restaurant’s approach to customer service:

Pret A Manger—a London-based chain that has spread over the past decade to the East Coast and Chicago—is at the cutting edge of what the Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls “emotional labor.” Emotional because the worker doesn’t create or even necessarily sell a product or service so much as make the customer experience a positive feeling. Labor because, as Hochschild wrote in The Managed Heart (1983), the worker must “induce or suppress [his or her own] feeling” to achieve the desired effect in others. Creepy as it sounds, emotional labor is a growing presence in this economy, coming soon to a fast-food outlet near you.

Noah’s reaction:

Why must the person who sells me a cheddar and tomato sandwich have “presence” and “create a sense of fun”? Why can’t he or she be doing it “just for the money”?

Because it makes for a more pleasant customer experience which itself encourages repeat visits. How hard is that to understand? Noah’s piece is riddled with the kind of lefty condescension that drives me up the wall. Take this paragraph:

The more the rich get used to fawning service, the more the rest of us—or rather, the rest of us who can afford to buy a sandwich rather than brown-bag it from home—find we rather like it, too. Eventually everybody will have to act like a goddamned concierge. I don’t want to believe this, but I fear it may be true.

Fear? Fear that consumers might get better service and that corporations actually try to encourage this? Fear that when you are in service jobs, your boss may keep tabs on how well you interact with customers and colleagues? It’s fascism, I tell you. Or some kind of false consciousness. Apparently, Noah wants service that in no way is encouraged to be cheerful. My advice? Visit France.

And this service ethic of fake cheeriness began in the US of A. It was one of those things I noticed and loved immediately arriving here, and over the last quarter century saw spread throughout my country of origin. The service culture – which is indeed a kind of performance – makes everything more pleasant to buy, blends consumerism with entertainment and enjoyment. Wanna scowl with your coffee? Vaughan Bell pushes back some more:

Those of a political bent might notice an echo of Marx’s theory of alienation which suggests that capitalism necessarily turns workers into mechanistic processes that alienate them from their own humanity.  However, the concept of ‘deep emotional labour’ is really where the approach can start becoming unhelpful as it has the capacity to denigrate genuine compassion as ‘required labour’. I doubt many nurses go into their profession intending to ‘monetize their emotions’ or feel they have been ‘alienated’ from their compassion. And as armies are loathe to admit, soldiers serve for their country but fight for their platoon mates. Is this really a form of ‘deep emotional labour’ or it is just another job where emotions are central?

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Travis Waldron watched as the National Football League commissioner deflected questions about the links between football and brain injuries:

[T]he NFL has hardly “led the way” into concussion research, as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Malcolm Burnley showed recently in a timeline of the NFL’s response to concussions. The first chair of the league’s concussion task force, formed in 1994, regarded concussions as an “occupational hazard,” and the league rejected the American Academy of Neurology’s guidelines for returning concussed players to competition in 2000. It was still publishing research skeptical of the dangers of concussions in 2005; in 2007, it still claimed that research did not show that “having more than one or two concussions leads to permanent problems if each injury is managed properly,” even though CTE had already been found in multiple dead former football players.

That’s not a history of leading the way. That’s a history of standing in the way. The league and Goodell have plenty of reason to continue standing in the way, given that acknowledging a link between football and brain injuries, as well as the league’s role in obscuring that link in the past, would open it up to legal and medical liabilities it doesn’t want and possibly can’t afford.

Who does Roger Goodell think he is in evading core accountability? The Pope?

(Above: Malcolm Gladwell vividly describes how playing football beats up the brain.)